


Another Country Heard From

by Queue



Category: To The Hilt - Francis
Genre: M/M, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-01
Updated: 2010-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-05 14:28:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queue/pseuds/Queue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I'd never have thought of writing this story if Katherine Tag hadn't requested it. From my perspective, thanks are therefore owed; with luck, she'll feel somewhat the same.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Another Country Heard From

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katherine_tag](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katherine_tag/gifts).



> I'd never have thought of writing this story if Katherine Tag hadn't requested it. From my perspective, thanks are therefore owed; with luck, she'll feel somewhat the same.

'Right secretive bugger, aren't you.'

'Pot, meet kettle,' I said lazily, and felt him blow hot laughter against my chest where he'd collapsed across me. 'And how do you mean, "secretive"? I'd say you just learned rather a lot about me.'

'Part of the secret, then, isn't it, that learning anything like this about you was even an option! Come on, Al, don't play the innocent with me. Couple of years now we've been friends. More, maybe—my memory's never at its best right after coming like that.'

It was I, this time, who laughed. 'Enjoyed yourself, I gather?'

'Never doubt it. And you as well, judging by the evidence. Been a while, had it? I ask only for information, mind...' He trailed off, mischief clear in his voice.

I smacked him lightly on the ass. 'Secretive, you said. Get on with it.'

'Right, where was I—oh, yeah. Way I reckon it, you and me've been friends for a good while now. Spent a fair amount of time together, we have, off and on. Even let you drag me out to spoil a good walk or three. And never a hint did you give in all that time that you might play on both sides of the fence now and then.'

'I don't remember ever hearing _you_ talk about being bi,' I pointed out.

Chris snorted. 'Didn't have to, did I. Bird-watched with you more than once and didn't exactly bother to hide my catholic tastes in fowl. You knew I had an eye for gander as well as goose. You might have told me you'd a bit of the same sight.'

'I might have,' I said, and stopped, caught. I found questions of trust hard to answer always, no matter who posed them. How much did I want Chris knowing?

Conversely, how much did I want to have to hide?

'I might have,' I said again, 'if I'd known myself before tonight.'

I could feel surprise run through Chris's body like an electric current. He lay still for a moment, then pushed up on his elbows to look more closely at my face. 'Huh. First time, this, was it?'

My face heated, a reaction I'd thought long outgrown. I raised an eyebrow at him—surely the answer to that was obvious now?—but he appeared entirely ready to wait me out, clasping his hands together on my chest and resting his chin on them when I didn't immediately respond, grinning at me with Uttleyish insouciance.

Damn. Admissions of ignorance didn't come readily to me. Not, at least, in areas where I was meant already to know my way around, as in sex I largely had from my early teens, thanks to Himself's then-housekeeper's nineteen-year-old daughter and her puzzling but welcome interest in my suddenly taller, breaking-voiced self.

I'd been entirely ignorant about painting at one time, though. And the steps I'd taken thus far to remedy that ignorance—at least to my current level of informed awareness of how much I had yet to learn—had in large part proved rewarding beyond anything I'd expected. Commitment to exploration; chancy in whatever context it arose, but thanks to the life I'd thus far led, I believed deeply in it nonetheless.

'Yes,' I said eventually. 'Yes, it was. And well worth it, not that your ego needs the stroking. I'd no idea what sleeping with another man might be like until this. A series of surprises.'

'Yeah? What surprised you most, then?'

I considered this. 'How good it was, I suppose,' I said finally. His grin grew cocky, and I boxed him lightly on the ear. 'And as well, how ... usual it seemed, somehow. Familiar. Like sleeping with Em, almost.' He blew me a raspberry, which from that distance was a wetter affair than usual. 'Aside from the obvious, you sod, such as more hair and smaller tits and two cocks in the bed and twice the wet spot not to sleep in and the like. And how you ever manage to get your end away with that sort of attitude escapes me entirely.'

'I don't,' he said, grin widening. 'Young and Uttley do, at least until it's down to skin and too late for anyone to change their minds. You'd be surprised how many otherwise upstanding citizens out there have a secret yen to fuck a gym coach—and how many of those same pillocks want the skinhead to fuck _them_. Or want to tumble the secretary bird in one form or another, though that's not much of a shock.'

'I wouldn't be all that surprised, actually,' I told him. 'Don't take Tobe's word for my worldliness, I beg you. He's got this poetic idea that the mess with the brewery and Ivan's death wrested my ethereal artistic self into a harsh reality I'd taken quite literally to the hills to escape. I knocked about the globe for a good deal of my twenties—Rome, California, wherever I found either a teacher I wanted or something I needed to paint—and I spent the time in between travelling cheap by train or steamer, even hitching when I had to. Not much people do to one another shocks me particularly any more.'

Which wasn't to say, of course, that I didn't sometimes shock myself. Or—say "surprise," instead. "Shock" seemed overly strong and also negative, and although I'd not expected ever to find myself flat on my back in another man's bed, the experience had been intense and pleasurable and the opposite of negative in every way I could think of. I opened my mouth to tell Chris as much, but he'd found a new bone to worry.

'Well, all right, Mr Worldly Wise, since you bring it up: how'd you get to your advanced age without a "close encounter," hanging out with daubers and artist types when you weren't wasting good taxpayers' money wandering about in that Scottish fortress your ancestral lot persists in occupying? Thought all artists were poofs.'

Here be dragons, I thought. No fault to Chris, who couldn't have known. Best to duck the question for now, though. That story needed alcohol, and right at the moment I didn't want the distraction of drink—or the need to seek it.

Chris, however, wasn't quite finished with his slanderous generalizations. 'Most peers, too, what with being a dying class and all.'

Saved by the bell. 'I'll tell Himself the latter, if you like,' I said drily.

Chris shuddered. The movement shifted him against me from the ankles up, and I felt nerve endings I'd thought down for the count awaken into new interest. 'No, thanks. Haven't met the man, and no desire to. He sounds something fierce. Probably eat me for breakfast as soon as look at me. Especially if he knew I'd corrupted his nephew.' He leered at me, and I laughed.

'I doubt it, you know. He's nothing like what you think him. Nor, since we're on the subject, are all artists gay. Or all nobles, either. I shudder to think where you're getting this load of bollocks.'

'The _Sun_ tells me all I need to know about life,' Chris said piously.

'That explains a great deal,' I said. 'Have you considered raising the standards of your reading material to somewhere a bit above the level of the sewers?'

'And miss out on the Page Threes? No chance.'

'Shallow bastard.'

'Never denied it,' Chris said cheerfully. 'Doesn't stop me from being good at what I do, though. Probably helps, if you want to know the truth. Makes it easier to figure out what my clients want and their targets don't. Young and Uttley: satisfying the general public for ten-plus years. And the odd flexible friend for as long as he likes.' He looked a bit astonished at having said this last out loud, but he offered no retraction.

On reflection, I found that I didn't want one. Quite the reverse, in fact. Interesting. Unexpected. 'Yeah?'

'Yeah. Yeah, definitely.'

'Not worried Mad Alexander's weirdness might be catching?' I made the question as casual as I could manage, but the answer mattered. I'd become who I was through a number of deliberate choices, and on the whole regretted little about the result. But I'd lost past partners to such concerns. Indeed, I'd lost my wife to them for years, though miraculously we seemed now to have reached a viable détente. Ridiculous, I'd always thought, to turn one's back on good sex and genuine connection for such a baseless fear. But no less devastating, for all that, to be the one upon whom the back in question was turned. I'd liked Chris from the start, first on the strength of Tobe's regard for him and then on his own recognizance, and by happy chance he'd seemed to feel much the same. I didn't have friendships enough that I could afford to let the assuaging of physical hunger cost me one—and if I had to pay that cost, I didn't want to pay it with Chris. Better to know at the outset what risk of that existed here, rather than be blindsided later.

Chris looked at me quizzically. 'Have you _met_ me, Al?'

I looked down the length of our entwined bodies, then back up at his face. 'Given that we now know one another in the biblical sense, I'd say the answer to that question's rather obvious, wouldn't you?'

He conked me on the point of my shoulder, the rough karate callus on the outside edge of his hand rasping against the sensitive skin there.

'Ow,' I said mildly.

'Didn't hit you hard enough to hurt a fly—you'd know if I had, believe me. And don't try and change the subject, you daft prick. For fuck's sake, no, I'm not worried about anything of the kind.'

My mouth twitched in disbelief despite me, and his tone sharpened.

'Look at me, Al. Family dead, or as good as. All the yobbos I grew up with are still behind the bars I got free of by the skin of my teeth. I've a boot full of zipped-bag characters I put on and off like jumpers and a skill-set that'd give the dole queue ladies a stroke. And pretty much everyone I've banged since the last nick shoved me out the door thought I was someone else until the lights went out. Messing about with you is different, and I'll tell you straight, it's a sight better. I don't have to molly up with you, for one thing. And you don't give a shit about the gym coach or the poncey chauffeur or the copper or the rentboy—'

'Not my thing, really, that last.'

'Shut it, you. But see, that's my point. It's _not_ your thing. You're no more here—or wherever, the pub down the corner or that mad Middle Eastern place you like in Cheltenham or the golf course you made me faff about on last month—for any of the zipped bags than I am for Mad Alexander, whoever the fuck he is. Just Chris Young and Alexander Kinloch in _this_ bed, mate. And a good thing, too.'

'Indeed,' I said, more lightly than I felt. I couldn't remember ever hearing Chris make a speech of that length, let alone one of such import. In his own inimitable fashion, he'd answered me beyond any chance of misunderstanding. Relief I hadn't anticipated shivered across my skin. I sought for some distraction, something to change the mood, and found it. 'Seems to me we're weird enough together without any role-playing nonsense aggravating things.' I shifted my legs further apart around Chris's thigh where it lay between mine, and his pupils dilated.

'Bloody right we are. And speaking of aggravating things...' Chris brought a knee up until the hairy roughness of his leg rested just against my cock and leaned in, not hard but insistently. I bit my lip, but a muffled sound escaped me nonetheless. Chris laughed. 'Ready for another round, eh?'

I grinned at him, catching my breath when he nudged his knee still closer in response. 'Yeah, maybe. Depends. What's on offer?'

Chris ground down just slightly with his hips, his hardening cock rubbing luxuriantly against me. I closed my eyes against the delicious shock of it. Not better than sex with Em, this, but eye-openingly different all the same. When I opened them again, he'd slid a foot or so down my body.

'I'd ask what's your pleasure, m'lud,' he said, half-mockingly, 'but I don't guess you'd know, being a babe in the proverbial woods where shagging a bloke's concerned. So you'll just have to wait and see.'

'Lie back and think of England?' I suggested a little breathlessly.

His tongue flicked out to swirl around the head of my rapidly swelling cock, and my hips thrust up towards him without volition. 'Think what you like, Al,' he said, bringing his hands up to hold my hips down. 'Just do me a favor and don't count on remembering it after, okay? If that tack-sharp brain of yours still works properly when I've done with you, I'll eat my chauffeur's cap.'

'I'll take that bet,' I gasped as his mouth descended.

After all, either way, we'd won.


End file.
